“Prayer paintings, manga and motivational images”: Gitte Maria Moller's cryptic artworks

Gitte Maria Moller’s artwork occupies the strange space between medieval tableaux, Japanese manga and David Lynch’s weirder than weird commercials. Crammed to bursting with religious iconography and executed across mixed media from oil on tracing paper or Enduro Ice to digital print on perspex to site-specific installations, Gitte’s creations make a string of cryptic allusions to the future of mankind – until, that is, you spot the friendly-looking croissants.

Born in Cape Town, Gitte graduated with a BAFA from the Michaelis School of Fine Art at the University of Cape Town in 2015. “Since then I have participated in numerous group shows, mostly in Cape Town, where I live and work,” the artist explains. “My process is not very particular, but I do spend a lot of time looking at images to help me get started. These images are very varied, including ancient manuscripts, Arabic miniatures, prayer paintings, manga and motivational images, to mention a few.”

For Gitte, working contains a cathartic quality. “I often think of my work as a kind of private parable in which I get to comb through the tensions that exist between difficult and contradictory states of being and feeling. A large part of my aesthetic is drawn from Gothic architecture and painting, where the artistic mode is often aggressively decadent and detailed, corresponding to the hysteric and obsessive religiosity of the time. I find this mode of working calming precisely because it is so neurotic. It is a space in which something can be, in equal measure, pleasant and repulsive, vacuous and meaningful, both regrettable and full of possibility.”

Looking to the future, Gitte tells us that “I don’t have any big plans for the rest of the year (yet), but I am hoping to do a residency sometime soon. At the moment I’m busy working on a handful of oil on panel paintings, and will be helping another artist put a show up next month.”